‘All We Imagine as Light’ Review: Mumbai Comes Alive in Payal Kapadia’s Complex ‘Little Women’-esque Portrait of Sisterhood | Cannes

Mumbai is alive in Payal Kapadia’s stunning second feature All We Imagine as Light. It’s a boundless shape-shifter, always moving its millions of disparate parts, and transforming from when the sun sets. “You better get used to impermanence,” a young nurse named Prabha (Kani Kusruti) says. There’s the sense that Mumbai will leave you behind if you can’t keep up with it. 

Caught up in the city’s tides is Prabha, who spends the sweltering days working in a ramshackle local hospital. As the head nurse, she’s evidently well-respected, tending to her patients with a comforting but firm hand. But in between check-ins with her patients, Prabha and her fellow nurses chat about movies and the film stars they think are cute. Kapadia’s rich film feels most vibrant when it slows down to observe women just simply being. 

Prabha barely knew her husband when their marriage was arranged by her parents and he departed for Germany. And romantic relationships, or lack of, provide some of the tension between Prabha and her roommate, a fellow nurse named Anu (Divya Prabha), whose rendezvous with her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz (Hridu Haroon) are the source of hospital gossip. There’s a generational divide, in which Anu resents Prabha’s stringent morality, while Prabha admonishes her junior co-worker for her worsening reputation. And while Prabha calls her husband to no reply while Anu ducks out in the cover of night to meet with Shiaz, there’s the sense that she perhaps longs for the freedom and rebelliousness of youth. Kapadia observes Prabha and Anu without any judgement, capturing the varying degrees of agency for women.

Following her debut documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, which detailed the effect of India’s caste system on university life, Kapadia again makes room for politics here. Hospital cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is unceremoniously evicted from her home of two decades, coming up against legal roadblocks despite Prabha’s support. A small but thrilling moment in which the pair throw rocks at a banner advertising apartment blocks defines Kapadia’s layered view of Mumbai. Indeed, it’s a city bustling with energy and vibrancy, but it’s also marred by the gentrification and urbanisation that threatens to displace the people that have made it what it is. 

And yet, rarely has a city in moonlight looked so beautiful, as Kapadia and cinematographer Ranabir Das capture the Mumbai skyline as a twinkling sky of hazy brake lights, street lamps and lit-up windows. Set amidst India’s monsoons, the film is soundtracked to the constant patter of rain as much as it is by its wistful, jazz-infused score. Each frame is equally as busy with activity, indicative of a city that never stays stagnant. Prabha sitting still in thought is accompanied by a train hurtling past behind her. A clandestine kiss occurs behind a bush, hiding from a nighttime soccer game. And yet for the constant hum that underlines life in Mumbai, Kapadia mines gentle intimacy in the gentle interactions between the two leads.  

Walking home from work, Prabha flirts with rebelliousness herself in her interactions with an interested doctor who offers little notes of effusive poetry. Nevertheless, she stops herself from pursuing connection further. “Even if you live in the gutter, you’re allowed to feel no anger,” we hear at one point in voiceover. All We Imagine as Light doesn’t deal in emotions as enormous as rage, but the feelings of Prabha and Anu feel monumental all the same. If marriage has paradoxically shut herself from experiencing desire, she finds connections just as fulfilling in Anu and Parvaty. There’s something akin to Little Women or Jane Austen in Kapadia’s tender portrait of complex, well-forged sisterhood. So much of All We Imagine as Light is bathed in the melancholic blues of night, but there’s an ever-present warmth and playfulness that truly defines Kapadia’s delicate and resonant film. It’s irresistible. 

Grade: A

This review is from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival where All We Imagine as Light premiered in Competition. It is currently without U.S. distribution.